Social network analysis

Complexities of Collapse: the evidence of Maya obsidian as revealed by social network graphical analysis

by Mark Golitko

Antiquity, June 2012, with James Meierhoff, Gary M. Feinman, and Patrick Ryan Williams

A Survey on Social Networks and Organization Development

by Nikolaos Mavridis

Co-authored with: Balooshi, N., Mavridis, N., Qirim, N., in Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Collaboration Tehcnologies and Systems, Denver, CTS 2012

Social networking sites emerged with the development of Web 2.0 tools and technologies. This phenomenon has grown in... more Social networking sites emerged with the development of Web 2.0 tools and technologies. This phenomenon has grown in momentum with the appearance of popular websites such as FaceBook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter. However, apart from personal use, social networks have become an important constituent in the business field. This research introduces the evolution of social networking in relation to organizational development. Furthermore, it investigates multiple aspects and linkages between social networking and organizational development. This is in terms of creating a collaborative and a knowledge sharing social networks to produce more productive organization.

Tindall, D.B. 2004. “Social Movement Participation Over Time: An Ego-Network Approach to Micro-Mobilization.” Sociological Focus, 37(2):163-184.

by David Tindall

This is a paper I published in Sociological Focus. It involves a quantitative longitudinal analysis of participants in the wilderness preservation movement in British Columiba. In particular, I focus on the role played by social networks.

This study focuses upon the relationship between  personal networks and the participation of individuals in a... more This study focuses upon the relationship between  personal networks and the participation of individuals in a social movement over time, a rarity in the social movement literature which has mostly used cross-sectional designs to explore this topic.  Objectives of the research include empirically documenting some of mechanisms that underlie the effects of network ties on social movement participation (thus taking a step toward filling a gap in the literature), examining the explanatory power of an ego-network model of individual participation in social movements over time, and examining whether network variables have net effects on activism, once past activism is controlled.  This last objective was designed to examine whether or not network effects are spurious.  Data were collected through two waves of a panel survey administered to members of three formal environmental organizations in Victoria, British Columbia in 1992, and again in 1998.  These organizations were central to the British Columbia wilderness preservation movement.  Multiple regression and path analysis are utilized to examine the relative importance of network degree versus network range, as well as frequency of communication and level of movement identification, for explaining level of social movement participation. Results show distinct effects of network degree, network range, communication, and identification on level of activism.  An additional finding is that network (and network process) variables have effects on new activism that are independent of the effects of past activism. A theoretical discussion considers the implications of the stage of the cycle of protest, and biographical availability in influencing these processes.

How Many Makes a Crowd? On the Evolution of Learning as a Factor of Community Coverage

by Yaniv Altshuler

As truly ubiquitous wearable computers, mobile phones are quickly becoming the primary source for social, behavioral... more As truly ubiquitous wearable computers, mobile phones are quickly becoming the primary source for social, behavioral and environmental sensing and data collection. Today’s smartphones are equipped with increasingly more sensors and accessible data types that enable the collection of literally dozens of signals related to the phone, its user, and its environment. A great deal of research effort in academia and industry is put into mining this raw data for higher level sense-making, such as understanding user context, inferring social networks, learning individual features, and so on. In many cases, this analysis work is the result of exploratory forays and trial-and-error. In this work we investigate the properties of learning and inferences of real world data collected via mobile phones for different sizes of analyzed networks. In particular, we examine how the ability to predict individual features and social links is incrementally enhanced with the accumulation of additional data. To accomplish this, we use the Friends and Family dataset, which contains rich data signals gathered from the smartphones of 130 adult members of a young-family residential community over the course of a year and consequently has become one of the most comprehensive mobile phone datasets gathered in academia to date. Our results show that features such as ethnicity, age and marital status can be detected by analyzing social and behavioral signals. We then investigate how the prediction accuracy is increased when the users sample set grows. Finally, we propose a method for advanced prediction of the maximal learning accuracy possible for the learning task at hand, based on an initial set of measurements. These predictions have practical implications, such as influencing the design of mobile data collection campaigns or evaluating analysis strategies.

Trends Prediction Using Social Diffusion Models

by Yaniv Altshuler

The importance of the ability to predict trends in social media has been growing rapidly in the past few years with... more The importance of the ability to predict trends in social media has been growing rapidly in the past few years with the growing dominance of social media in our everyday's life. Whereas many works focus on the detection of anomalies in networks, there exist little theoretical work on the prediction of the likelihood of anomalous network pattern to globally spread and become ``trends''.
In this work we present an analytic model for the social diffusion dynamics of spreading network patterns. Our proposed method is based on information diffusion models, and is capable of predicting future trends based on the analysis of past social interactions between the community's members.
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We present an analytic lower bound for the probability that emerging trends would successfully spread through the network. We demonstrate our model using two comprehensive social datasets --- the \emph{Friends and Family} experiment that was held in MIT for over a year, where the complete activity of 140 users was analyzed, and a financial dataset containing the \mbox{complete} activities of over 1.5 million members of the \emph{eToro} social trading community.

Stealing Reality: When Criminals Become Data Scientists (or Vice Versa)

by Yaniv Altshuler

Published in IEEE Journal of Intelligent Systems

In this paper we discuss the threat of malware targeted at extracting information about the relationships in a... more In this paper we discuss the threat of malware targeted at extracting information about the relationships in a real-world social network as well as characteristic information about the individuals in the network, which we dub \emph{Stealing Reality}. We explain why \emph{Stealing Reality} attacks differ from traditional types of attacks against individuals' privacy, and discuss why their impact is significantly more dangerous than other attacks such as identity theft. We then analyze this new attack and show what an optimal attack strategy would look like. Surprisingly, it differs significantly from many conventional network attacks, as it involves extremely slow spreading patterns. We point out that besides yielding the best outcome for the attackers, such an attack may also deceive existing monitoring tools, due to its low traffic volumes and the fact that it imitates natural end-user communication patterns.

Social Networks of Milanese Merchants in Sixteenth-Century Castile

by J. B. (Jack) Owens

In Networks in the First Global Age, edited by Rila Mukherjee. Indian Council of Historical Research in association with Primus Books, Delhi, 2011.

This chapter focuses on the social networks of Milanese Merchants whose commercial activities centered on the... more This chapter focuses on the social networks of Milanese Merchants whose commercial activities centered on the Castilian city of Cuenca in the period 1550 to 1570.

Northern Iroquoian Ethnic Evolution: A Social Network Analysis

by John P. Hart

Co-authored with William Engelbrecht, 2012, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 19:322-349.

Ethnicity is one kind of social relationship that archaeologists explore. The evolution of the northern Iroquoian... more Ethnicity is one kind of social relationship that archaeologists explore. The evolution of the northern Iroquoian ethnic landscape in New York, southern Ontario, and the St. Lawrence Valley has been of long-standing interest to archaeologists. Since MacNeish’s (1952) pottery typology study, the predominant model for this evolution has been cladistic. Collar decoration served as a means of signaling attributes of the potter and pottery users that mirrored other more visible signals. We use social network analysis to determine whether pottery collar decoration data best fit MacNiesh’s cladistic or an alternative rhizotic model. The results better fit the rhizotic model.

Fuzzy Set Theory (or Fuzzy Logic) to Represent the Messy Data of Complex Human (and other) Systems

by J. B. (Jack) Owens

Co-authored with Emery A. Coppola, Jr.

Historians and Human Geographers deal with human systems or subsystems of considerable complexity. This situation... more Historians and Human Geographers deal with human systems or subsystems of considerable complexity. This situation presents a dilemma to those who use computational technologies, which demand a high level of precision to organize, analyze, and visualize information: the more complex the system is, the greater the imprecision of the available data. Historians and geographers often feel that their imprecise, ambiguous, contradictory, messy, largely qualitative information does not “fit” well in the available software categories, and they have trouble discussing the results produced when they work within computational environments because category assignment seems so arbitrary. This dilemma appears dramatically with the use of Geographically-Integrated History (GIH) as a research strategy. In this paper, we introduce fuzzy set theory (or fuzzy logic) as a proven solution for dealing with imprecision in complex systems.

Mihailo Popović - Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, With Satellite and Facebook to Byzantium. New Methods at the Institute for Byzantine Studies [in German]

by Johannes Preiser-Kapeller

Pre-Print from: Akademie Intakt 2011

Das Institut für Byzanzforschung (IBF) der ÖAW stellt weltweit eines der wichtigsten Zentren für die Erforschung des... more Das Institut für Byzanzforschung (IBF) der ÖAW stellt weltweit eines der wichtigsten Zentren für die Erforschung des Byzantinischen Reiches und des östlichen Mittelmeerraumes als Übergangsregion zwischen Europa, Asien und Afrika von der Spätantike bis in die Frühe Neuzeit (300-1500) dar. Dieser einzigartige Status wurde zuletzt im Juni 2011 durch eine hochkarätig besetzte internationale Evaluierungskommission bestätigt, die unter anderem festhielt: „[…] no other research institute in the world has such long-term projects or provides such a service“. Besonders hervorgehoben wurden dabei aber auch die „modern approaches“, die in den letzten Jahren am IBF für die Erforschung der mittelalterlichen Welt erprobt wurden. Zwei dieser innovativen Ansätze im Bereich der Historischen Geographie (Historical Geographic Information Systems – HGIS) und der Textedition und Proposopographie (Soziale Netzwerkanalyse – SNA) sollen hier kurz vorgestellt werden.

Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Analyse mittelalterlicher sozialer Netzwerke am Beispiel der spätbyzantinischen Kirche und Gesellschaft (Possibilities and limits of the analysis of medieval social networks on the example of Late Byzantine Church and Society)

by Johannes Preiser-Kapeller

Paper for a lecture at the Oberseminar für mittelalterliche Geschichte, Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena (Germany), November 17th, 2011, Dept. of Medieval History; the slides for the presentation you find here:
http://oeaw.academia.edu/JohannesPreiserKapeller/Talks/60893/_In_the_Holy_Spirit_beloved_brothers._Possibilities_and_limits_of_Social_Network_Analysis_for_research_on_the_Late_Byzantine_church_and_society_in_German_

Contents:

- Einige Grundlagen der (Historischen) Sozialen Netzwerkanalyse

- Vom historischen... more Contents:

- Einige Grundlagen der (Historischen) Sozialen Netzwerkanalyse

- Vom historischen Dokument zum Netzwerk

- Das Individuum im Zentrum – Ego-Netzwerke in Byzanz

- Die Verflechtungen innerhalb einer Institution – Netzwerke der Interaktion in der Synode von Konstantinopel und ihre zeitliche Dynamik

- Die Ungleichverteilung von Netzwerkverbindungen – das Geflecht der spätbyzantinischen Aristokratie
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Ein kurzer Ausblick: die Erfassung des Raumes – der geographische Aspekt von Netzwerken

- Zusammenfassung

Reconceptualising Conflict and Consensus within Partnerships: The Roles of Overlapping Communities and Dynamic Social Ties (PhD Thesis 2009)

by Katy Vigurs

Partnership is a dominant theme of public policy and service provision in England and in other western countries. It... more Partnership is a dominant theme of public policy and service provision in England and in other western countries. It is also a concept that remains relatively under-researched and under-theorised, especially with respect to conceptualising underlying relational processes that can shape conflict and consensus within partnerships.

This thesis draws on a richly textured ethnographic study, using an in-depth case study of a voluntarily-founded, network-like, cross-sectoral partnership, which aimed to develop and implement a community learning centre in the village parish of Broadley, located in the English Midlands.

The research sees fieldwork conducted over twenty-four months, using multiple methods of qualitative data-generation including the observation of partnership meetings and activities, semi-structured interviews and the collection of partnership artefacts (meeting minutes, funding bid document, emails). It presents an ethnographic view of the inner workings of one partnership and follows its entire lifecycle. This partnership was not sustained and did not realise the vision to which it aspired.

A central concern of this thesis is to investigate the development of conflict and consensus within partnership practice. The contribution of the thesis is to tease out how these elements are understood. This study challenges naive texts that prescribe simplistic, recipe-based formulas for achieving partnership success. Instead, it illustrates what can happen when partners do not develop sufficiently strong and balanced sets of social ties between one another. Consequently, this thesis sets up a new research agenda focusing more specifically on issues of community overlaps, identities and social ties.

This thesis has value in terms of providing a deeply relational account of challenges facing the development of one cross-sectoral, network-like partnership. It draws together insights from partnership literature, community literature and fieldwork, and provides a strong basis from which further research can be developed.

Tindall, D.B. and Barry Wellman 2001. “Canada As Social Structure: Social Networks and Canadian Sociology.” Canadian Journal of Sociology, 26:265-308.

by David Tindall

SNA Paper 1: A Network Perspective on Social Capital, Knowledge Networks and Innovation

by Andries du Plessis

Numerous studies, including organisational studies, explore the role of social capital. In this the role of a network... more Numerous studies, including organisational studies, explore the role of social capital. In this the role of a network perspective becomes apparent since there is general consensus that relations carry with them potential value. In turn, relations exist within networks and as such can be measured and analysed using Social Network Analysis.

Feeding and non-feeding aggression can be induced in invasive shore crabs by altering food distribution

by Andrew Jackson

Human activity can have a large impact on
surrounding ecosystems. For example, humans alter resourcemore Human activity can have a large impact on
surrounding ecosystems. For example, humans alter resource
distributions for other species, potentially modifying these
species competitive dynamics. These changes in local
competitive processes are frequently associated with species
invasions. Here, we investigate how differences in resource
distribution affect competitive behaviour using the highly
invasive European shore crab (Carcinus maenas). Using a
controlled laboratory experiment in combination with
behaviour assays and social network analysis, we show
that individuals feeding in habitats with clumped food
distributions are more aggressive than individuals feeding in
habitats where food is evenly dispersed, and this aggression is
present even on days where crabs are not feeding.Additionally,
this persistent aggression can be induced, suggesting that
individuals of this invasive species possess the flexibility
to modify their competitive behaviours in response to
differences in food distributions. Furthermore, we show
how these individual responses can lead to changes in
overall organisation of aggressive interactions within a
population. We discuss these results in relation to how
human impacts can have long-term effects on competitive
behavioural strategies, and how behavioural flexibility can
allow invasive species to colonise and persist in highly
impacted sites such as urban ecosystems.

The combination of social and personal contexts affects dominance hierarchy development in shore crabs (Carcinus maenas)

by Andrew Jackson

Many animals that live in groups maintain competitive relationships, yet avoid continual fighting, by forming... more Many animals that live in groups maintain competitive relationships, yet avoid continual fighting, by forming dominance hierarchies. We compare predictions of stochastic, individual-based models with empirical experimental evidence using shore crabs to test competing hypotheses regarding hierarchy development. The models test (1) what information individuals use when deciding to fight or retreat, (2) how past experience affects current resource-holding potential, and (3) how individuals deal with changes to the social environment. First, we conclude that crabs assess only their own state and not their opponent’s when deciding to fight or retreat. Second, willingness to enter, and performance in, aggressive contests are influenced by previous contest outcomes. Winning increases the likelihood of both fighting and winning future interactions, while losing has the opposite effect. Third, when groups with established dominance hierarchies dissolve and new groups form, individuals reassess their ranks, showing no memory of previous rank or group affiliation. With every change in group composition, individuals fight for their new ranks. This iterative process carries over as groups dissolve and form, which has important implications for the relationship between ability and hierarchy rank. We conclude that dominance hierarchies emerge through an interaction of individual and social factors, and discuss these findings in terms of an underlying mechanism. Overall, our results are consistent with crabs using a cumulative assessment strategy iterated across changes in group composition, in which aggression is constrained by an absolute threshold in energy spent and damage received while fighting.

A Review of Evolutionary Graph Theory With Applications to Game Theory

by Paulo Shakarian

Paulo Shakarian, Patrick Roos, Anthony Johnson, BioSystems, Elsevier, accepted, 2011.

Evolutionary graph theory (EGT), studies the ability of a mutant gene to overtake a nite structured population. In... more Evolutionary graph theory (EGT), studies the ability of a mutant gene to overtake a nite structured population. In this review, we describe the original framework for EGT and the major work that has followed it. This review looks at the calculation of the "fixation probability" - the probability of a mutant taking over a population and focuses on game-theoretic applications. We look at varying topics such as alternate evolutionary dynamics, time to fixation, special topological cases, and game theoretic results. Throughout the review, we examine several interesting open problems that warrant further research.

Diffusion of Latent Semantic Analysis As a Research Tool: A Social Network Analysis Approach

by Hamid Darvish

Social networks in (slow) motion. A complexity perspective on network change in the context of educational reform.

by Nienke Moolenaar

This paper highlights the main elements of the research proposal for which I received a Rubicon grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). With this grant, I will be conducting a 2-year study at the University of California, San Diego. The study is aimed at exploring how changes in teachers' social networks support or constrain the implementation of educational reform.

Social networks change over time. In schools, social networks among teachers reflect a web of relationships through... more Social networks change over time. In schools, social networks among teachers reflect a web of relationships through which teachers exchange valuable resources, such as instructional materials, information, knowledge, and social support. Availability of these resources, or a lack thereof, can support or hinder both teachers’ instructional practice and student achievement, especially in times of educational reform (for instance, the implementation of a new reading curriculum). However, empirical knowledge on social network change during educational reform and its association with educational outcomes is limited.

Drawing on complexity theory, and using a mixed method longitudinal design, this study aims to understand how teachers’ social networks change during educational reform and how this network change enhances school improvement in terms of teachers’ instructional practice and student achievement. Understanding the dynamics of social networks in the context of educational reform promises valuable insights for educational theory and practice as these networks may be leveraged to better create, use, and diffuse resources in support of school improvement.

Exploring new horizons: Teacher professional development through networked learning

by Nienke Moolenaar

Amersfoort, D.L. van, Korenhof, M., Moolenaar, N. M., & de Laat, M.F. (2011). Exploring new horizons: Teacher professional development through networked learning. Paper presented at the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction, Exeter, UK.

Teachers’ professional development initiatives are increasingly focusing on social networks to support teacher... more Teachers’ professional development initiatives are increasingly focusing on social networks to support teacher learning. The aim of this study was to examine teachers’ experiences with networked learning in primary education. Using an Input-Process-Output model, this article reports on an exploratory case study among 16 Dutch elementary teachers. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using constant comparative analysis. Findings indicated that teachers’ experiences with networked learning can be characterized by five input factors, four process factors, and five outcome factors. We found evidence of feedback loops connecting the input, process, and output of networked learning. Insights from this study increase our understanding of teachers’ professional development through networked learning and the factors that constrain and support teachers’ networked learning in daily practice.